Sydney: A faulty radio system was one of a host of factors that contributed to a fatal mid-air collision between two helicopters in northern Australia in 2023, an official investigation showed on Wednesday.
Four people were killed and nine more injured when two scenic flight helicopters collided in mid-air on Australia’s Gold Coast in the state of Queensland on January 2, 2023.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) on Wednesday released its final 200-page report on the incident following a two-year investigation, highlighting a series of safety issues that contributed to the crash.
The incident occurred when one helicopter piloted by Ash Jenkinson was taking off while the other piloted by Michael James was coming in to land. Both helicopters were Eurocopter EC130s operated by the Gold Coast’s Sea World theme park.
The ATSB found that the radio system in the helicopter in which Jenkinson and three passengers died had “defects that limited transmission range and affected reliability of transmission.”
ATSB investigators found it was likely that Jenkinson had made a taxiing call to alert James of his departure but that it was not received due to the defects.
“Without the taxiing call being received, the pilot of the inbound helicopter, who was likely focusing on their landing site, had no trigger to reassess the status of the departing helicopter as a collision risk,” ATSB Chief Commissioner Angus Mitchell said in a statement.
The ATSB found that the failed radio transmissions, limitations in visibility from both helicopters and the pilots’ “competing priorities” led to the crash.
It said that the operator had made changes to improve the tourism product in the months prior to the accident, including commissioning the use of a second helipad location and introduction of the EC130 helicopters, which “undermined risk controls” over time, Xinhua news agency reported.
“The most fundamental lesson from this investigation is that making changes to aviation operations, even those that appear to increase safety, can have unintended consequences,” Mitchell said.
James and his five passengers and three passengers on Jenkinson’s helicopter were injured in the crash.
(IANS)
